Is Jair Bolsonaro the Trump of South America or Rio’s answer to Mussolini?

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: an establishment caste blighted by corruption; a reactionary outsider with a flair for invective and a grudge against mainstream news; an election fought and won on the servers of social media. This year, Jair Bolsonaro stepped from obscurity and into the presidency on a platform of violence, intolerance and militarised authority. But as the battle for control of the fourth largest democracy enters round two, we ask will his supporters return to the streets when the reality of his promises hit home?

The azure bank notes, each worth about £20, fluttered through seven counting machines at the rate of hundreds per minute. It was well past midnight and the police were still at it. After 14 hours, they had their total: R$42,643,500 and $2,688,000. In all, cash worth more than £10 million, recovered in September 2017 from the secret bunker of just one politician.

It was the biggest cash find in the history of Brazil – but it was just a grain of sand on the beach of corruption being uncovered since Operation Car Wash, the world’s biggest graft investigation, which had started three years earlier. The plot went like this: Brazil’s public coffers had been brazenly used as a cashpoint by its political class for decades – house speaker Eduardo Cunha, a kind of Brazilian Frank Underwood, was said to have stashed £30m in offshore accounts – and contracts worth billions to construction companies would be inflated and a percentage kicked back to officials. Everyone won, except ordinary Brazilians.

Supporters celebrate Bolsonaro’s election outside his home in Rio De Janeiro, 28 October 2018

It had long been suspected. Now, the people knew it for sure. A year earlier, even before Operation Car Wash began, anger at corruption had seen millions surge to the streets. As a foreign correspondent, it was quite a welcome to Brazil – the thud of exploding sound bombs reverberating off the grand façades of downtown Rio De Janeiro, the smell of tear gas festering in the night air.

Brazil had not seen protests like this in a generation. Charlo Ferreson, a hairdresser with a keen sense of injustice, was there. She figured she was witnessing something historic. “It was the watershed,” she said. “Brazilians knew all politicians were thieves. In June 2013, we woke up.”

Back then, Brazil was not in crisis. It was about to host the World Cup and the Olympics. There was little hint the country’s newly confident self-image would come crashing down; that Car Wash would implicate everyone who was anyone, including four former presidents; that Rio was on the verge of an economic crisis so severe police would not be able to pay for petrol, let alone rubber bullets.

A rally for former army captain Jair Bolsonaro takes to the streets in São Paulo, seven days before his election as president, 21 October 2018

There was just a sense that not everything was right, the unmistakably rotten scent of corruption, a malaise that had in all likelihood existed for decades, even centuries. “Excuse the inconvenience,” one placard read. “We are changing our country.”

So why did the protests happen then? Ferreson suspects she knows. It began on Orkut, a Google-owned social network that was briefly dominant here a decade ago. It gave Brazilians the first taste of a platform on which they could air gripes about entrenched injustices – the petty thief locked up in a stinking jail while the millionaire politician stole with impunity – while bypassing an out-of-touch media and a bought-up political system. “It was very subtle,” Ferreson said, “but people began to complain.”

By 2013, Facebook had supplanted Orkut. The digital murmurs had become louder and more organised. That day in June, when video of police violence against marchers went viral on social media, it sparked a mass street movement and generated a moment of real political power.

It did not last, but it would not be the last time. And there was something else, the matter of who was protesting – such as Ferreson, for example, a 45-year-old mother-of-two. Sitting at her kitchen table in a detached house on a gated, tree-lined street on the periphery of Rio, she did not emanate revolution.

The protesters were not just students, activists and anarchists. The whole society was frustrated. “It was the first time the right went to the streets,” Ferreson said. That nascent movement was about to be propelled by legal tremors that would shake the continent.

Investigations such as his were usually nixed by the most powerful, but Moro left politicians quaking and the public baying for more

It had begun, appropriately enough, at a car wash. In March 2014, anticorruption police raided a nondescript garage in the capital, Brasília, suspecting its operators of money laundering. The clues they found sparked a probe that would demolish the credibility of the political class.

Construction giant Odebrecht, whose chief executive was later jailed for 19 years, was found to have created a department dedicated to paying bribes to hundreds of codenamed politicians, who spent it on luxury villas, helicopters, fine wines and even finer prostitutes. The company’s corrupt tentacles were found to have stretched across South America and Africa and the scam even determined policy priorities: World Cup stadiums that would barely be used, superfluous airport terminals, even hydroelectric dams. Many billions were stolen.

Leading the probe, which was fictionalised by Narcos producer José Padilha in Netflix series The Mechanism, was judge Sérgio Moro. A 46-year-old with cropped black hair and an intense, studious manner, he soon became a hero to those who saw corruption as Brazil’s curse. Every round of police raids on money launderers, public officials and company executives, every new scandalous revelation as to the sheer scale of the fraud, it all added to his aura.

In Brazil, historically, investigations such as this were nixed by the most powerful before they could get going. But Moro was leaving politicians quaking and the public baying for more. He was becoming a legend, but his path was about to bring him into conflict with another. And, as Brazil descended in an unprecedented political and economic crisis, it ultimately led to the unlikely ascent of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right authoritarian with a fondness for tyranny. It sparked the rise rise of the man who casts himself as the Brazilian Donald Trump.

Judge Sérgio Moro addresses a conference in São Paulo at the height of Operation Car Wash, 15 August 2017

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by many measures the most popular president in the history of Brazil, took his old friend by the arm and looked out of the third-floor window at the crowds below. “Gilbertinho, we can only fight with the soldiers we have,” he said.

It was April 2018 and Lula, aged 72, knew his time was up.

It had all begun 40 years before, a few footsteps away, in the office he occupied as leader of the ABC Metalworkers Union. The seventh child of illiterate farm labourers from northeast Brazil, Lula worked as a shoeshine boy before taking a job in the booming car industry here in suburban São Paulo, during the fading years of the military dictatorship, which ended in 1985.

Lula is short and seductive. He has a bristly beard, a love of cachaça and a folksy charm that both embodies and gave him licence to transcend his roots, accent and education. In his younger days, he led wildcat strikes and was imprisoned by the military regime. He founded the Workers’ Party (PT) and ran for president in 1989, 1994 and 1998, losing every time. As a leftist party, the PT found the combined might of Brazil’s economic elites too big an obstacle, the aforementioned Gilberto Carvalho, one of Lula’s closest aides, told me.

The 67-year-old met me in the party’s modest offices, where red murals of leftist icons adorn the building and the worn interior could be that of a union office in Redditch. There is little trace of the electoral behemoth that allied with corporate power to win four elections.

Carvalho, earnest in a navy short-sleeve shirt and half-frame glasses, admitted that, as the party edged closer to success, it sold out. Like other major parties, its agents accepted millions in illegal funding. The scam created a closed shop for those willing to play the corruption game.

Lula was elected in a landslide in 2002 and oversaw a sunny eight-year epoch. He created moderate social programmes unheard of in one of the world’s most unequal countries, lifting 28 million out of poverty. He left office with a booming economy and an approval rating of nearly 90 per cent. “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be,” goes the cliché, dubiously attributed to Charles de Gaulle. Here was one of those moments when Brazil felt the future had arrived.

With hindsight, many Brazilians subscribe to two narratives about this period. The first, that the PT was corrupted by the realities of power in Brasília and presided over the greatest known corruption scheme in history is the kinder of the two interpretations. Indeed, it allows for the possibility the party changed Brazil for the better and its two presidents did not personally stash millions in offshore accounts.

The other belief is that the PT and Lula are a collective Antichrist, the font of all corruption, injustice and strife. This, of course, tends to be the view held by many of the party’s opponents.

“We were going to become a communist dictatorship for sure,” Ferreson, who grew up in a PT-supporting family, but came to loathe the party, told me with conviction. “Lula deceived the great majority of people very well.”

Former president Michel Temer, who shut down the Car Wash task force, 19 April 2018

In truth, Lula could dance any samba he liked until the music stopped. Not long after his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was elected to a second term in 2014, Brazil tipped into its worst-ever recession. Police, hospitals and schools went without basic supplies.

Rousseff, the country’s first female president, was impeached on an extraneous charge just after Rio 2016. To the PT, the fact she had shielded the probe from political obstruction only to be removed by a congress full of politicians implicated in it amounted to a coup. Her successor, Michel Temer, shut down the federal police task force assigned to Car Wash.

Two weeks after Rousseff’s impeachment, the first criminal charges against Lula were filed. “From the start, Lula believed it was a strategy to get him out of the political game and arrest him,” said Carvalho. “Why impeach Dilma only to have Lula become president again in 2018?” It was all a conspiracy to keep the PT from power, Carvalho said. On this account, Moro was not so much a crusading anticorruption judge as a political actor with a secret right-wing agenda. Meanwhile, Lula drafted the narrative of his own persecution. Glenn Greenwald took up the cause. Geoffrey Robertson QC led the charge in the UN. Noam Chomsky flew in to lend support. “Only Jesus Christ was more honest than Lula,” the former president said. To underline his own political potency, he soared into a gigantic lead in pre-election polls.

It’s complicated. But if Lula was set on enriching himself in the manner of Cunha or Collor, he doesn’t appear to have been very good at it. Sure, he rode on Odebrecht’s plane, had them fund a biopic that chronicled his rise from poverty and – if Odebrecht is to be believed – accepted a gift of a new 49,000-seat stadium for his favourite football team, Corinthians, although Lula denies this. But, unlike many of his leading opponents, the trail of cash-filled suitcases was absent.

Nonetheless, vengeance was swift from a legal system not always noted for its dynamism. Moro convicted him for accepting a bribe from another construction company, OAS, in the form of an upgrade and renovations on a duplex apartment in a seaside resort. An appeal court raised the sentence from nine-and-a-half to 12 years. At the time of writing, he is yet to face accusations in six other trials.

Back at the window of the union building, Lula was calm, but resigned. The tens of thousands of red-shirted supporters he expected to protect him from police had not appeared. “There was a certain sadness because there were not the numbers he had imagined,” Carvalho said.

It was nearly 24 hours after the deadline Moro had set for the former president to surrender. The pair decided he must give himself up. “Power to you. Let’s do it,” Lula told his friend, before heading outside, battling through a crowd of his supporters and heading to the police station.

When Bolsonaro isn’t threatening to punch gay men on the street, he projects the image of a jovial family man

Hitler? Who said I was like Hitler?”

The tone was more puzzled than outraged. Two months later, in June 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was sitting with me in a cramped meeting room next to his congressional office in Brasília, surrounded by memorabilia from Brazil’s dictatorship, American progun trinkets and books by alt-right authors. When the rigid former army captain isn’t threatening to throw his opponents in jail or punch gay men on the street, the 63-year-old likes to project the image of a jovial family man.

The presidential candidate wanted to know which insubordinate had compared him to the Führer. The answer was two of his leading opponents and several experts on the history of fascism. But his opponents were not individuals to be taken seriously, Bolsonaro said with confidence. One centre-left rival would “open the doors to communism here in Brazil, for sure”.

It was not the ideal way to distance himself from the political tactics of the Thirties. (“He campaigns and sounds like a fascist. He is intolerant of any idea different to his about how Brazil should be,” Federico Finchelstein, a historian of totalitarianism in Europe and South America, told me.) But if tyranny was taboo, no one told Brazil, a country that, unlike neighbouring Argentina, still reveres the military above other institutions.

Lula persisted with a surreal campaign for the presidency from his jail cell and had reached 33 per cent in the polls. But with a court seeking to bar his candidacy, there was added significance to Bolsonaro being in clear second with 15 per cent. As things stood, the two would contest a runoff. How would he fare in that?

“I’m going to win in the first round.”

Now it was my turn to be perplexed. A knockout victory required more than 50 per cent of votes. Surely a candidate so extreme had hit his electoral ceiling? His numbers with women were less than half what they were with male voters.

“How?” I asked.

“I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.”

That he did.

Mothers were mutilated, nuns were raped and men were castrated. The young Jair Bolsonaro was a fan

A few days after Jair Messias Bolsonaro celebrated his ninth birthday, in 1964, the military seized power in a coup backed by the US and subsequently supported by the UK. It marked the start of two dark decades in South America, as collateral damage from the Cold War saw autocrats rule with impunity.

Under the regime, mothers were mutilated in the presence of their children. Nuns were raped. Men were castrated. In 2014, Brazil’s National Truth Commission found the regime responsible for the disappearances or deaths of 434 of their compatriots and the torture of at least 1,843 more. But because of an amnesty law passed in 1979, no one has ever been punished.

Young Jair, who grew up in the countryside of São Paulo, was a fan. At 15, he told me, the military came to his town to hunt for Carlos Lamarca, a “traitor, terrorist and deserter” who wanted to overthrow the regime. Bolsonaro said he guided soldiers through the vegetation, streams and caves of the Atlantic Forest near his home. “I fell in love with the army,” he said.

It is not clear how much faith to put in this account (“These stories about him guiding the army are a complete lie. What army would accept a 15-year-old as a guide? That didn’t happen,” Gilmar Alves, once a close childhood friend of Bolsonaro, told me). But, perhaps a consequence of a difficult relationship with his alcoholic father, he found a lifelong reverence for military power.

He signed up to be a cadet but in a 15-year career never saw combat (“I would have liked to have killed someone,” he offered). He left the army in 1988 after being punished for campaigning on military bases against low pay. He immediately ran for political office.

As Brazil transitioned to a liberal democracy, Bolsonaro was a lone and insistent voice for the return of the military regime. “I am in favour of a dictatorship,” he hollered to congress in 1993. “We will never resolve serious national problems with this irresponsible democracy.” But this conversion from army captain to firebrand politician did not impress the military top brass. Ernesto Geisel, who served as president in the Seventies, said Bolsonaro was “a case completely out of the ordinary, even for a bad soldier”. A chief of staff of the armed forces, Jonas de Morais Correia Neto, called him “a deceiver, cunning and cowardly”.

Bolsonaro’s politics centred on an absolute belief in the right of the state to use unbridled violence to achieve order. Torture? Yes. The heinous tactics of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet? Sure, if necessary. The death penalty for all premeditated crimes? Why not?

In 1999, Bolsonaro reserved particular ire for Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s then centre-right president, telling a television station the country would only improve with a civil war, “doing the work the dictatorship did not do – killing about 30,000, starting with FHC”.

In a magazine interview, he added some tips about how that might happen: “It all depends on planning. You can get a gun and kill the president in Brasília. With a bow and arrow, you can eliminate a person from 200 metres away. And even with just a penknife you can reach the president’s neck. But I want to make it clear that I am not urging anyone to do it.”

To describe him as peripheral would be an understatement. In 27 years in congress he authored two laws. “He was a buffoon, a clown. Nobody took him seriously,” said Gilberto Carvalho.

‘You can get a gun and kill the president in Brasília. Even with a penknife you can reach his neck’

I would not rape you, because you do not deserve it.”

The words were as good as a campaign launch. Bolsonaro’s Trumpian jukebox of invective against women, gays and racial minorities was often deployed tactfully to gain media coverage. Maria do Rosário, a PT deputy and his target this time, turned and left the chamber. She had heard it before – when Bolsonaro had thrown the same insult at her eleven years earlier.

But while before Bolsonaro had typically relied on fleeting coverage in mainstream media, his campaign now had the means to bypass those structures. From this moment in 2014, his embryonic campaign made skilful use of Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to sideline traditional outlets.

Digitally engaged activists such as Charlo Ferreson, who lived in a cyber world, were an early source of followers. “We wanted a candidate who spoke to our issues,” she told me, explaining how she and fellow activists had assessed like-minded politicians and chose Bolsonaro. It was important that the candidate was prepared, for example, to state that Lula would like to turn Brazil into the Soviet Union or advance the theory that Cuba had sent guerrillas to the country disguised as doctors. “He spoke for the streets when no one else would,” she said.

Another source of early support was the richest people in Brazil, many of whom reviled the PT not only for its corruption, but for the way it had altered the country’s social structures. “The economic elite has cultural values entrenched in slavery,” Guilherme Boulos, a candidate who ran for the presidency this year on a left-wing ticket, suggested to me. “They simply cannot accept poor people in airports, blacks in universities or maids earning a decent salary.”

As Operation Car Wash produced an endless show reel of the rapaciousness of their rulers, life for many ordinary Brazilians was biting. Unemployment soared and tough-won gains in living standards slipped away. Spiralling crime (the murder toll would hit 63,800 deaths in 2017, almost 90 times higher than in the UK) gave the impression of a state unable to fulfil its basic duties.

Bolsonaro’s poll numbers emerged from the vicinity of zero and began creeping upwards. His strongman pitch was to sweep away the corruption and violence plaguing Brazil with whatever force was necessary. He promised to give police, who currently kill more than 5,000 each year, more latitude to shoot criminals, to relax gun laws and reduce the age of criminality to 16.

More than anything else, his campaign railed against the “reds” he said were poisoning the country. Communism was everywhere. Brazil was the next Venezuela. The PT was sexualising young children with its “ideological indoctrination” in schools. In contrast, he would restore family values, seek closer links with the US and move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem.

Bolsonaro promised to drain the swamp in Brasília: ‘Either they go abroad or they go to jail’

Inviting the comparison with Donald Trump, Bolsonaro promised to drain the swamp in Brasília and give absolute support to Car Wash. To bring order he would appoint generals to key posts. In a sop to the power of the economic elites, he promised privatisations and a radical tax reform.

Anyone – be it human rights activists, environmentalists or journalists – who got in the way was an enemy. The Amazon rainforest would be exploited regardless of the environment. By the time I interviewed him, four months before election day, it was clear he had traction.

To understand the phenomenon, I turned to Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, an academic who has researched fanatic Bolsonaristas for two years. “They love him, they cry for him, they meet him at airports,” she told me. “It runs through all social classes. It is an electoral phenomenon. There is a disbelief in the political system, which they oppose. Their vote for Bolsonaro is not an exchange of favours. It is free. It comes from love. He is a saviour and an outsider.”

Among poorer voters, there is also a tremendous fear of crime. “People fear leaving their jobs at a shop at night, walking to a bus stop and being robbed of the little they have,” Pinheiro-Machado added.

The momentum only kept growing. After years of work, Ferreson could sense it. Two years before, she had faced a battle to convince voters she met on the street. But not now.

“We won over everyone,” she said of her campaign trips with Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s eldest son (whom he refers to as “Zero One”), to a crime-stricken periphery of Rio. “Once, people would always turn a blind eye to Bolsonaro. Suddenly, everyone was thinking alike.”

Soon, young supporters were on every street corner, hopeful and proud. When Lula was replaced as the PT’s presidential candidate by Fernando Haddad, a bookish former professor, Bolsonaro leapt into first place.

One day in early September 2018 was typical. Bolsonaro was mobbed and carried on the shoulders of his adoring supporters through Juiz De Fora, a university town north of Rio. He waved. He grinned. Then he grimaced, doubled over in pain and grabbed his stomach with both hands.

He had been stabbed.

A month before the election, Bolsonaro was stabbed in the stomach while campaigning in Juiz De Fora. He lost 40 per cent of the blood in his body, 7 September 2018

Bolsonaro was rushed to intensive care with injuries that could easily have been fatal. Doctors staunched the bleeding, but not before he had lost 40 per cent of the blood in his body.

Doctor Eunice Dantas emerged to face the press. The candidate has survived, she said. But only just. If he had lost much more blood – or if the knife had entered at a slightly different angle – he would be dead.

Watching on television, Ferreson felt “orphaned at that moment”. But Gilberto Carvalho, Lula’s aide, also had a sinking feeling – the attack might be to Bolsonaro’s benefit. No more debates. No more questions. His point about violence in Brazil proven. Bolsonaro could sit back in hospital and watch his poll numbers creep ever higher.

Days afterwards, Bolsonaro posed for a photo in his bed in intensive care, doing the finger gun salute that had become the symbol of his campaign. The message was clear.

Slowly, large sections of the establishment began to adjust to the new reality. Financial interests decided he was a better bet than the PT. The media treated him as a president in waiting. Brazil’s evangelical churches, vast pyramid schemes tempered by piped gospel music, started to move their huge influence towards a full-throated backing for the far-right candidate. The scene was set, but still no one on the left believed Bolsonaro could win.

On election day, Guilherme Boulos headed for his polling station in São Paulo and was struck by the lack of noise. “It was the silent vote. It was the vote of fear,” he realised. “It was the vote of the right.”

In Rio, the first round polls on 7 October closed at 5pm. The first indications were the regional exit polls. In the race for Rio governor, a Bolsonaro-aligned candidate, Wilson Witzel, came first with 41 per cent. In an opinion poll just over a week before, he had scored just four per cent.

Fireworks and shouts erupted across Brazil, even before the national exit poll was announced. Bolsonaro has easily won on the first round, the rumours said, in a landslide. He had not, but he might as well have. In the end, Bolsonaro scored 46 per cent of the valid vote, more than doubling his support since Lula’s exclusion from running a little more than a month before. His tiny Social Liberal Party would now be the second largest in congress. The world’s fourth largest democracy had delivered a shock greater than Trump and Brexit put together.

Fake news is big in Brazil. In many cases, bigger than the actual news

What happened?

The left are sure they know: WhatsApp.

“The spread of hate through social media was a phenomenon that absolutely amazed us,” Carvalho reflected. “We went to war with traditional weapons. They came with an immensely technologically superior strategy and hit us with impressive efficiency.”

Fake news is big in Brazil. In many cases, bigger than the actual news. And its distribution via WhatsApp, which is encrypted, leaves outsiders and opponents bewildered by its effects. But it isn’t just the outright lies (such as the video on Facebook that claimed Haddad supported penis-shaped milk bottles in nurseries and got 4.9m views). Those, in any case, were not limited to one side.

It is also the frightening power to target precise segments of the population with tailored messages, as illustrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A concerted attempt by the Brazilian media to fact-check false or dubious claims appeared to have barely made a dent.

“This was the first WhatsApp election,” Boulos said.

Soon after the first round, the newspaper Folha De S Paulo published a story that Brazilian companies illegally paid agencies, such as Quickmobile, to send hundreds of millions of WhatsApp messages denigrating the PT. Packages were said to cost £2.4m.

The story’s writer, Patrícia Campos Mello, was bombarded. Bolsonaro said Folha should be closed. Mello was abused, threatened, hacked and harassed in person. Eventually, she hired private security. “It’s crazy,” she said. “I’ve been in Libya, in Somalia, and nothing like this ever happened.”

One consequence of the hailstorm of fake, dubious, distorted or unverifiable news was that all reporting was questioned, especially if the stories were unfavourable to a chosen candidate. “That Folha story was fake news,” Ferreson, who does not trust any institutional media, said.

House speaker Eduardo Cunha the day after his arrest on corruption charges, 20 October 2016

Of course, Bolsonaro supporters would say, the losers in any election will naturally make excuses. And there is no doubting the PT’s volcanic unpopularity. Bolsonaro fan Steve Bannon, once the chief strategist for Donald Trump, emerged a few days later and took the opposing view to the extreme. (Q: “Do you think fake news could help a candidate?” A: “No, no.”)

With an impregnable lead and the second round closing in, Bolsonaro addressed a rally in São Paulo via a Facebook video feed and made a chilling threat to his leftwing opponents. “Either they go abroad or they go to jail,” he said. “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland. It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazil’s history.”

Boulos, who watched the speech on the way back from campaigning with Haddad in the northeast, is the sort of troublesome activist Bolsonaro likely had in mind with his threats. “I think he wanted to send a message,” he said. “He already knew he had won and wanted to send a signal that his would not be a government of national unity, that it would be a government of fury and polarisation that will take an iron fist to democratic freedoms.”

In the second round, Bolsonaro triumphed easily against Haddad.

In the days that followed, Bolsonaro made Sérgio Moro his minister of justice, seven months after the judge had jailed his leading opponent. The appointment means he will be in charge of a wide-ranging anticorruption crackdown.

The PT cried foul. Lula fell into a depression. He feared he would be treated as an asset by Bolsonaro, who might humiliate him as a way of throwing fresh meat to his supporters. “He cannot see what is ahead,” Carvalho said. “He is such a sociable person. To be condemned to solitude is very cruel.”

Bolsonaro now does not have the same worry. For once, he has no shortage of friends. Unlike the toytown reactionaries of the UK, there’s no doubt he is the real deal. And of all the alt-right candidates nurtured by Bannon across the world, he is now one of the most successful.

President Trump tweeted that he had an “excellent call” with him, adding, “We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on trade, military and everything else!”

Theresa May was not so keen. She broke with the usual protocol and did not call Bolsonaro. However, the British ambassador, Vijay Rangarajan, did send his congratulations, adding, “Happy that Winston Churchill inspires you in democracy, freedom and British values. The UK-BR partnership is vital in economic reform, for technology, investment, human rights, energy and climate change.”

Impeached president Dilma Rousseff delivers her farewell address in Brasília, 31 August 2016

That mention of climate change was no mistake. Bolsonaro’s wholehearted support for loggers and miners could prove fatal to the Amazon, with disastrous consequences for the planet. During the campaign he promised to withdraw from The Paris Accords, but has since walked that back, learning that, unlike the US, it is hard for Brazil to duck an international consensus.

Nonetheless, Brazilian democracy faces the challenge of its life, not least in terms of adjusting to the new reality. The aftermath of the election saw an explosion of violence against activists and minorities. “If you’d told me this would’ve been the situation ten years ago I wouldn’t have believed it,” political scientist Jairo Nicolau told me. “It’s like the kid at school with no friends suddenly becoming a charismatic political leader.”

That said, Nicolau believes that a definitive break from the democratic norms is unlikely. If Car Wash proves anything, it is that Brazil has some strong and resilient institutions. Indeed, Bolsonaro’s new government will soon have to face up to some very tough political and economic realities. Despite historically being a big-state nationalist, Bolsonaro will adopt painful economic reforms of the pension and tax systems and widespread privatisations. In his ferocious attempts to resolve Brazil’s public security crisis, substantial (additional) bloodshed seems inevitable. Even if he gives Moro a free hand to root out corruption, that too will likely be a tremendous battle.

The potential for further unrest is obvious. A fatigued population voted, after all, for an end to corruption, violence and pain.“Nothing indicates that will happen,” Boulos said. Charlo Ferreson, like many Bolsonaro supporters, disagrees. “Whoever didn’t win didn’t listen to the streets,” she said. “How many lifelong politicians weren’t elected? That is the result of our work.”